Biography
Residency Dates: 29 January - 10 February
Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. He is currently completing two books: “The Cinema of Extractions,” a method-oriented study of cinema’s material and formal engagements with resource extraction industries, and a larger project, tentatively titled “The Art of Oil in France: A Global History, 1944-1975,” that examines how the development of the midcentury French petroleum industry shaped and was shaped by visual culture—including popular, art, and industrial/corporate cinemas, painting and sculpture, and advertising and industrial design—in material, aesthetic, and conceptual ways. Jacobson is the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, 2015), a finalist for the Theater Library Associations’ Richard Wall Memorial Award and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao, he edited “Media Climates,” the Winter 2021 issue of Representations. He has published articles in Cinema Journal, Screen, Film Quarterly, Film History, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, Environmental History, Post45, Framework, History and Technology, Early Popular Visual Culture, The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Literary Review of Canada as well as numerous anthologies and exhibition catalogs for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay. He is a recipient of fellowships including a Fulbright to France, multiple grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Rochester Humanities Center, where he was in residence in 2016-17.
